Chapter Text
Seshat-An-Wet had lived longer then some suns. Ancient machines they had built before being forced into hibernation by the war in the heavens told them exactly how long it had been in terms of atomic decay and vibration. They did wonder if it really counted if the vast bulk of it had been spent insensate, locked into a box to avoid the depredations of both those they had fought against and those that they had called Gods.
But movements in the galaxy at large had been noted and power had been fed again into sarcophagi that had resisted all attempts by entropy to destroy them. The light of their soul once again burned in the sockets of their death-mask and fingers of silvery metal pressed against the lid that trapped them. Necrodermis was no mere flesh, to waste away when unused. It responded as smoothly as it did the day Seshat first took this body and lifted away the lid.
With the sarcophagi breached the full information load of the local network caught up to them. Canoptek servants reported their actions in a constant background hum while the thoughts of the few Necrontyr who had been awakened before their leader formed spikes. The two honour guard at the end of the hall. The handful of labourers that had served as tests for the reanimation. It took milliseconds for Seshat to comprehend what existed of their empire and only milliseconds more for their will to be imposed upon it. Generators that drew energy from the intersections of space-time reactivated and Scarabs fell upon stored resources to expand their numbers. Canoptek Spyders in the major crypts started bulk reactivation procedures and in the central chamber where Seshat was just coming to their bone-like metal feet the honour guard stepped forward.
In the chamber, directly in front of the sarcophagus was a plinth and suspended vertically above it in what was nothing more then a show of power was Seshat’s staff. Their fingers closed around it exactly as they had before the long hibernation. Reattached to it’s owner’s will it drew in energy from the systems around it, the rod in the head glowing green. From that head spread seven points, each point a different sensor that fed Seshat’s desire for knowledge that was the only thing other then their hatred to survive into the new body. It reported that all was as it should be and so with the clanking footfalls of their honour guard following Seshat walked the corridors to the nerve centre of what had been an empire.
With power restored the devices that had allowed Seshat’s will to be imposed across space searched out their partners. Flaws in reality were exploited to link disparate locations and convey the same instructions that had been spread across the primary tomb. Each of the other locations in turn replied as their own generators made energy out of nothing and restarted sensor arrays. Surrounding Seshat a display of the galaxy built itself, or at least those few thousand stars that they had claimed.
Things were very different to when Seshat had slept. The marks of the Old Ones were non-existent, and their favoured children were but specks in the blackness compared to the empire that should have been. The other child of the Old Ones, their unstoppable bioweapon, still infested worlds but had lost almost all of the cohesion that the Old Ones had forced upon them. New civilisations had emerged, large blocks of space blanketed by the same patterns of signals. But most concerning was the noise from the background of the background, that other unreality that the Old Ones had used as their primary weapon. It roiled and quaked as if a stormy sea rather than a facet of existence and when Seshat turned their sensors upon it, they felt as if something looked back.
Processes began to return confirmation messages as Necrontyr emerged from their tombs and took up those tools they had set down before sleeping. Then an automatic counter timed out and produced an error message. A tomb had failed to respond to the startup commands. Knowledge flashed into Seshat’s mind, pulled out of local storage as they demanded it. The tomb was nearby as interstellar distances go. The tomb was on the single moon of an otherwise unnoticeable world. The tomb was where the fleet, such as Seshat had managed to save, was stored.
New commands went out but here, finally, relativity got to sneer at Seshat. The chance of information from the event to be passing any of their sensors right now was absurdly low and it would take years for an active scan from the nearest other tomb to return any information. Seshat could be patient, they were built to survive eternity, but right now there were things they needed to know. Another request to the local databanks gave the information on the backups, two sites on the planet below which acted as targets for the reality cracking teleportation devices. The honour guard followed Seshat down towards the generators themselves and along the way Scarabs formed themselves into a cloak upon Seshat’s shoulders. This soon after reawakening power was limited so the last member of Seshat’s retinue was a Canoptek Spyder that was already in the chamber when they arrived.
With a crack that shock reality itself, here became there and there became here, and Seshat walked out onto a new world.
Sensors in the staff fed readings directly into Seshat’s mind. Gravity was easily within design limits, atmosphere was mostly nitrogen and oxygen, background electromagnetic flux was high enough to suggest other sources of technology on the world. The roiling of the unreality reached even here but that was just the higher background noise. Automatic subroutines sorted the incoming flux, trying to identify intelligence and location from the waste they scattered over the electromagnetic spectrum. If anything that was using limited waves for communication could be called intelligent.
The path to the surface was blocked by time and continental drift but weapons that could disintegrate matter meant that no path was truly blocked. Fantastically sensitive gravity detectors in the staff allowed Seshat to plan the easiest path so it was less then an hour later that they and their retinue walked out of what had been a wall of a pyramidal temple and looked up at the night sky.
The moon was just rising on the horizon, half of it intact and half of it scattered in pieces that trailed outwards in defiance of gravity.
That would explain the lack of a response from the tomb.